The GNOME Journal team has published issue 17 of the GNOME Journal, titled "Women In Open Source". This is their first issue with a unified theme, and with all articles written by women from the open source community. The idea and execution of this issue was created by the GNOME Women community. It comes packed with articles about GNOME and its underlying frameworks.

Is this policy really a good idea? I mean, reinforcing the division and placing women in their own special context in open source projects only serves to further emphasize isolation.

To turn this context around, take a field where (at least in my experiences) men are a distinct minority: primary school education. Consider, as an example, that some peer-reviewed journal that focused on primary school education decided to create a feature issue wherein the sole feature was that the contributors were 'under-represented' male educators. The general effect of this issue would be to emphasize a distinction and further isolate men in primary school education as 'special' in some way. It would not serve as a recruitment tool. The proper response would be to simply make sure that the system training primary school educators is welcoming to anyone, rather than to respond with "OMG! A man is going to become a kids teacher! Lets write a story about it!"

Essentially, this issue is saying "See! Look how many women we have! (Take that RMS!)" rather than simply making Gnome/FOSS an open and welcoming place where people don't immediately focus on gender differences.

Of course, this may require behaviour modifications to a number of prominent individuals within the FOSS community.

I agree with you in general and as the Editor 'n Chief of the GNOME Journal, there was nothing meant by highlighting women in this issue beyond the simple fact that it would be neat to have a unified theme (and set of writers) for this issue. I believe it was Stormy Peters (a prominent woman in FLOSS) who proposed the idea. There was no discussion about the subject, just excitement and agreement. This was not a political thing, nor an affirmative action-based thing. We simply had expressed interest and that is what the team agreed to.

Thanks for reading the GNOME Journal! We always love feedback and especially suggestions. We also accept articles from random people and submissions anytime.